Working Paper 83 - Are African Countries Richer Than They Are Developed? A Multidimensional Analysis of Well-Being

Sen’s capability approach inspired a new conception of development and succeeded in the Human Development Index (HDI). On the basis of HDI critics, we propose to enlarge the number of variables and we use 9 indicators of Standard of Living and 9 indicators of Quality of Life that allows measuring two components of well-being and that can be divided into various fields (health, education, environment, etc.) to provide a finest measurement of poverty. The empirical results for 170 countries in 2000 are based on two different multidimensional analysis of poverty, the Totally Fuzzy Analysis and the Factorial Analysis of Correspondences. The conclusions depend on the considered method but are generally similar. The paper focuses on the African continent and shows that some countries are “richer” than “developed” or inversely. The correlation matrix between different indicators reveals that education is a key variable for defining poverty. Comparisons extended with HDI classification and GDP per capita classification prove that monetary poverty is related with all other dimensions of poverty and that the HDI takes into account its essential dimension even if it can’t be used to reduce some specific aspects as our original index.